Facebook, Google Tumble as Best Places to Work

Yet again, Glassdoor has issued its annual list of the best places to work, and yet again, a handful of tech companies made the upper echelons of the list. However, there’s one big change from last year: Facebook, which previously placed first, is now in seventh place, just behind Linkedin (in sixth place) and ahead of Google (in eighth).

Google fell from fifth to eighth; that might also be a reflection of the search-engine giant wrestling with its own internal issues, including an employee walkout over inequality and sexual harassment.

This year, Bain & Company (a consulting firm, famous for having Presidential candidate Mitt Romney as its CEO) topped Glassdoor’s top three best places to work, followed by Zoom Video Communications and In-N-Out Burger. It will be interesting to see if the respective attempts by Facebook and Google to tweak their internal cultures will result in better rankings next year.

Poor leadership and unclear direction not only lower companies’ rankings on sites such as Glassdoor; they’re also key causes of employee burnout, along with toxic culture and work overload. Earlier this year, Blind asked its pool of anonymous tech pros whether they felt burned out by their companies’ leadership and unclear strategy; only 14.24 percent of employees at Facebook said they did, placing the company at the bottom of the list (some 18.33 percent of Google employees said the same thing, enough to give the company a similarly low ranking). That data aside, there are clearly factors weighing down the internal cultures at both companies.

As tech salaries plateau, perks and benefits—as well as a positive office culture—are key ways for companies to attract and retain talent. It’s not just about getting on these “best of” lists; for companies to succeed over the long term, they need the right brains—and they need to keep those brains happy.